They kept to the trees, partly to avoid being seen from the road, partly for shelter from the steady drumming rain.
The slow flashes of light from the Object reminded Rachel of the time she and Amy and several other friends had sneaked into the Harris County Fair. The lights of the midway and the swooping, whirling, rotating rides had blinded them—they’d failed to see a security guard and gotten caught, escaping punishment only by becoming unusually giggly and flirtatious.
“Does it bother anyone,” Harley said, “that the Object seems to have some kind of beacon?”
Sasha considered it. “It’s not very beaconlike, though, is it?”
True enough; as Rachel and Harley watched with Sasha, the lighthouse-like light seemed to pulse in an irregular pattern . . . flash, dark, flash flash, dark. “I hope it’s not a searchlight,” Harley said.
“With a heat ray behind it,” Sasha said.
“Stop it!” Rachel said.
“Sorry,” Harley said. “Sometimes we forget . . . Anyway, we’re here, as close as we can get. Now what?”
The rain had let up, though there was a strong breeze blowing in from the ship channel. “I want to go closer,” Rachel said. She had already decided that the Object was not a weapon—or it would have gone off already. It was sitting there as if waiting. . .
“Assuming that that’s a good idea,” Sasha Blaine said, “and I don’t think it is . . . how? It’s across this lake!”
Rachel pointed. “We can go across the bridge. All the cops and everybody are down the road.”
“Granted,” Harley said. “But then what? We’re here . . . we’ve had as close a look as anyone else. You are not going to touch it.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do, okay? But I think we should be closer. I think it’s supposed to give us something or tell us something.”
“It’s a sophisticated piece of alien hardware! Why doesn’t it just send us a signal?”
“I’m going to find out,” Rachel said. “You can come along or wait here.”
She broke from them and sprinted toward the causeway. But in the dark, the mud and gravel defeated her. She lost her footing trying to climb up to the road, slipped, and slid back to the bottom.
As she was getting to her feet—and Harley and Sasha approached, furious with her—a new light fell on the trio. “Hey, you people—freeze!”
Rachel thought she was going to pass out. Then five men walked forward, and one of them turned out to be Shane Weldon.
“We followed you,” Bynum told Harley. Weldon, Bynum, and their passengers all helped lift Harley up to the causeway.
“Not very closely.”
“We had to stop to pick up some instruments,” Weldon said. He pointed to one of his team, a young man with a boxlike object slung over his shoulder.
“Is that an actual Geiger counter?” Sasha Blaine said.
“Yeah. The best we could do on short notice,” Weldon said. “We got that, a camera”—he raised a Nikon still camera like those astronauts used on missions—“and a spectrometer.” Another of the party was struggling with a box twice the size of the Geiger counter. “That baby was built for lunar surface ops about ten years ago. I’m not sure it even works.”
“Gotta love NASA planning.”
“Don’t worry,” Weldon said. “I’ve got a real team putting together a set of instruments that will be able to tell what this thing had for breakfast this morning.” He nodded toward the Object, which now loomed over them like a dome-shaped building.
“Speaking of breakfast,” Sasha Blaine said. “What was the latest on the material this thing seemed to be ingesting? It appears to be sucking up water, mud, and even some vegetation.”
“There might be some small absorption, right, Brent?” Weldon said, looking at the sodden, sullen White House man. “But nothing major. We don’t feel as though Earth is about to be sucked into some kind of mini–black hole—”
“—At least, not this particular moment,” Bynum said.
“Can we just go?” Rachel said. The entire party was now on the causeway, but they had not moved forward. Rachel was happy not to have been arrested, and grateful for the helping hands . . . but she felt she had to get to the Object as soon as possible. Or she’d lose her nerve.
Harley took Rachel’s hand. “Okay, we’re going—”
“No.” Brent Bynum stepped in front of them, a pistol in his hand. “This is a hostile entity. None of us should be this close. I authorized it so we could gather data.”
“Brent—” Weldon stepped forward.
“Stop right there!” Bynum screamed. To Harley the White House man looked unhinged. He could hardly blame him. “I’m . . . responsible!”
“No,” Harley said. “I’m responsible. You and Shane told me. You had me sign the documents. I’m the official in charge of alien encounters. And I say we go.” Bynum was wavering, unsure.
“Look,” Harley said, “as far as the White House is concerned, I’m still in charge—and I’ll be blamed.” He held out his hand. “And take a step back, Brent. We’ve been reacting, not acting.” Harley pointed to the Object looming in the near-distance. “Would that thing be here if we hadn’t set off a goddamn bomb on Keanu? Give me the weapon. I don’t want anyone to get hurt.”
Bynum seemed happy to be rid of it.
As Harley dropped the piece into his lap and placed his hands on his wheels, he couldn’t help noting that he was shaking.
And that everyone was immediately trying to forget what just happened.
Within moments, the party had carefully advanced across the bridge, with Sasha Blaine looking over the railing for signs of Object-related sucking. “So far, so good.”
“Look,” Harley said. Off to their right, on the other side of the lagoon, still well north of the Object, half a dozen lights bobbed in the darkness. “I hope they’re on our side.”
“This might just be the most dangerous fucking thing I’ve ever done,” Weldon said.
“I certainly hope so,” Harley said, to general laughter.
Let’s review the bidding. There might be intelligent life on Keanu, which is no longer a NEO but likely a starship . . . at least one astronaut is dead, two others are missing . . . and both JSC and Bangalore have lost contact with the landing craft. And now two “objects” have slammed into the Earth’s surface.
Am I missing anything? Has the entire universe gone insane?
POSTER JERMAINE AT NEOMISSION.COM
You’re actually missing quite a lot. Stand by.
POSTER JSC GUY, SAME SITE
“Two minutes, we’re go for pop-up. Enabling RCS two and four. Go for main at plus two ten.”
Tea Nowinski was strapped into the left-hand couch of the Destiny, with Taj to her right. Behind them—and, once Destiny translated to a nose-up, tail-down orientation, below them—Natalia and Lucas were simply stretched out on a “bed” of netting that held the discarded EVA suits. It was not the most comfortable situation, but the g-forces associated with a launch from Keanu’s gravity field would be minimal. “About like a fast elevator,” Jasmine Trieu told her. Tea didn’t even need the straps at her seat. But she wanted them; they were a physical reminder that her vehicle was about to change locations.
“We show six-eighty on cabin pressure,” Tea reported, knowing Houston could see the same figure, but just to remind the team of that looming problem. She could not get a handle on the leak. Pressure wasn’t dropping in some straight line, suggesting some blockage somewhere. Destiny’s environmental system was pumping air into the cabin to compensate. That couldn’t go on forever, of course. They had to get off Keanu, and back to Earth.
“RCS is go, main engine is go,” Houston radioed, after the lag, which Tea now judged to be the most irritating thing she had ever experienced in her life. The reaction control system was a series of four small quads of rockets positioned equidistantly around Destiny’s service module. They were usually fired when Destiny needed to reorient itself.